Researcher * Writer * Cartoonist * Educator

Monthly Archives: June 2016

Last week I wrote an article for The Conversation about the legacy of mash-up pop band The Avalanches, whose last record dropped shortly after the dawn of “the new millennium.” I really enjoyed working with the site and their editors were fantastic, but I ended up writing twice as much as they could print. Below is my original draft, which features a lot more history of the band, and more theorizing about how technologies like sampling, record albums and digital music have changed the way music gets produced. Basically, I don’t think a band like The Avalanches could have emerged much earlier or much later in time — their record wouldn’t have been possible in 1997, and wouldn’t have been commercially viable by 2003. It will be interesting to hear what their new album sounds like in a few weeks. Here’s the original piece:

Can The Avalanches flourish in a pop music world remade in their own image?

Sampling pioneers The Avalanches are returning with a new record 16 years after their only major release. Their first album, 2000’s Since I Left You, has been dubbed a modern classic. A joyous, witty and funky melange of more than 3,500 samples, taken from vinyl albums bought in op shops, it sold more than 600,000 copies and influenced a generation of musicians.

The Avalanche’s brand of sample-saturated electronic music was unique in 2000. And their organization as enigmatic, amorphous collective challenged conventional ideas of what a band could be.

But the Melbourne-based band are reemerging to a world of pop music remade in their own image. Sixteen years on from Since I Left You, the music industry has transformed. It brims with samples, superproducers and music that is largely produced and consumed on computers.

The cut-up aesthetic that The Avalanches used so brilliantly in songs like the unforgettable Frontier Psychiatrist can be seen all over the Internet, not just in music, but also in the form of memes and GIFs that re-purpose and re-contextualise older media in evocative or amusing ways. Sampling existing material has become one of the most common ways that people communicate online.

Evan Wexler receives the main by-line for this story, but there is no accompanying text – the entire story is contained in Taylor’s illustrations – so it’s hard to know who contributed what to this piece.

Wexler calls himself a “Visual Journalist”, and most of his other work for Frontline has an infographic aesthetic, involving images which look a lot like sans-serif fonts and attempt to convey the same myth of neutrality that’s attached to typeset text.

This piece with Taylor is interesting in that it has a more tactile and subjective feel to it. The smudged ballpoint pen ink and yellowed photographs pasted onto graph paper come close to mimicking a student assignment from the years before Microsoft Office.

There’s an emotional component to the way this data is presented, a nostalgia for the “simpler days,” when sharing a newspaper photo meant actually cutting it out of the newspaper. It’s a good illusion; I found myself staring at my computer screen looking for traces of eraser dust on the images of the paper.

And yet – a closer look at these images reveals a digitally manicured sheen. The smooth gradient colours behind the drawings, the copy-and-pasted heads in the “7/10 teens” graphic, all reveal that these images have been constructed with Photoshop, not gluestick.

It wouldn’t have been difficult to digitally massage these images to look more authentically handmade, but I don’t think that’s the point. The digital effects, subtle as they are, mark this piece as having been processed, at some stage or another, but a computer, of being buffed down and shined up by a professional designer using an expensive suite of software.

There’s just enough obvious fakery here to let the reader know that, no, of course Frontline didn’t just publish scans of some graphs drawn straight onto graph paper with a BIC pen. That’s just not how journalism works.